Connecticut Soldiers, Sailors and Marines Fund

The Soldiers, Sailors and Marines Fund is not an appropriation that has to be renewed. General Statutes section 27-138 keeps it as a permanent trust fund in the custody of the State Treasurer as trustee, administered by the American Legion, with the Treasurer investing the corpus and reinvesting what is not needed for current disbursement. Section 27-138(b) sets the floor. The Treasurer disburses not less than two million dollars annually to the American Legion. That disbursement comes first from the interest accumulations of the fund, and if interest is less than two million dollars the Treasurer disburses as much of the corpus as is necessary to reach two million. None of that amount may be used by the American Legion for the expenses of administering or operating the fund, so the full sum goes to aid. Anything unspent at the end of the fiscal year returns to the corpus. What the fund pays for is the ordinary business of keeping a household intact: weekly living needs, rent, utilities, medical expenses, dental care, eyeglasses, hearing aids, medical equipment, and funeral expenses. It is not a loan and it is not a pension. The eligibility gate follows the same Connecticut pattern as the rest of this catalog. The applicant is a Connecticut resident, honorably discharged, with ninety or more days of active duty during a statutory wartime period, or discharged earlier because of a service-connected disability. Because the wartime test is the section 27-103 one, the closed Afghanistan and Iraq period end dates in the definitions entry apply here too. No disability rating is required and none is used to size an award, so a rating filter never hides this entry. Applications go through the American Legion's fund administrators rather than through the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Legion's own regulations and bylaws govern how an award is decided. Section 27-138a requires that those regulations, the bylaws, and the application forms be available, which is the document to ask for if an application is refused and the reason is unclear. Gifts, bequests and donations received in support of the fund are turned over to the Treasurer and added to the corpus, which is why the fund has outlasted every program that was appropriated alongside it.